I switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn't add much value over Sendy.
What's your experience with Sendy? Please let us know!
Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
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Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#12This is ridiculous. You don't only pay MailChimp for the software, you pay for their deliverability.
Sendy uses Amazon SES as the delivery service, not a PHP installation. Highly deliverable and much more cost effective.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world.
MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning combo.
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#13Checkout Converkit by Nathan Barry (he's in HN quite frequently).
Great alternative (sort of like aweber with good design & active development + a focus on building autoresponders).
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#14Sending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate. I use SendGrid free on Azure because Azure VPS too have an extremely high bounce rate. Setting up an SMTP server isn't exactly hard or expensive (regardless of if you're integrating mailing lists or not), it is the good rep' IP address and making it "someone else's problem" to deal with a lot of email related problems (poor reputation, b…
> Sending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate.
I do. Gmail spam-flagged the messages for a while, but after a couple of months it learned they're not spam. Surprisingly, other email providers (yahoo, ms, aol) never batted an eye.
I just made sure that the IP address assigned to my droplet is not in any blacklist, and configured proper SPF/DKIM headers (not hard with postfix).
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sendy uses Amazon SES as the delivery service, not a PHP installation. Highly deliverable and much more cost effective.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world. MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning c…
I find Mandrill, the backend service behind Mailchimp, a better option. They're much cheaper than SendGrid and even cheaper than SES in large quantities. And their deliverability is top notch.
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#16This can be $0/month if you host your Sendy install on Heroku instead of DigitalOcean (as I do).
Worth noting that with Amazon SES, if you want to send more than 10,000 emails in a day, you'll need to apply (to Amazon) for approval.
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sendy uses Amazon SES as the delivery service, not a PHP installation. Highly deliverable and much more cost effective.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world. MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning c…
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit.
Huh?
Are you sure you have configured it correctly, including DKIM?
We're using SES a lot (both transactional and campaigns) and never had a problem with deliverability.
There are too many spammers using it.
That seems unlikely considering the default sending limit is a mere 10k mails/day (iirc) and I doubt Amazon lets you raise that when your complaint-inbox is overflowing...
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#18shameless plug I built SimplerSES for the same reason - a cheaper alternative to MailChimp using AWS SES. It's built as a hosted service so theres no server costs, and you only pay for the emails you send out.
dont be ashamed! All the OP links have affiliates codes. (namecheap, digital ocean, sendy).
Haha, thanks. I've been growing pretty well organically, but still feel a little odd pitching my service online.
I should just set up a referral program myself and let others do it for me :p
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#19I switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn't add much value over Sendy.
That's a bit over the top. Mail chimp is hugely valuable if you are in their target user base. And for non-technical clients, mail chimp is (imo) a massive step up from other mailing list providers.
If you have 100,000 users (which we have), MailChimp is really expensive.
Details: http://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/
Mailchimp is thus $475.00 per 100K per month ($5700 per year!) That is a lot to spend on just email.
With Sendy + SES it costs me $10 to do a send to our 100,000 users.
Now I could play around with switching plans all the time at MailChimp to try and always minimize my costs, but I don't want to play that game. SES + Sendy keeps my costs linear with the number of emails I send, I don't have to play any games with changing plans, and it is significantly cheaper that MailChimp.
Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world. MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning c…
I find Mandrill, the backend service behind Mailchimp, a better option. They're much cheaper than SendGrid and even cheaper than SES in large quantities. And their deliverability is top notch.
Mandrill is not "the backend service behind MailChimp". Mandrill came after MailChimp and is a separate thing - they only allow it to be used for transactional email. Sending a newsletter via Mandrill violates its Terms of Service.